President Donald Trump has joked about having his face carved into Mount Rushmore. On Friday night, he will settle for standing in front of it during a White House-branded 250th U.S. anniversary event.

Trump will kick off the weekend’s Fourth of July festivities by headlining a “spectacular fireworks finale” and military tribute Friday night at the national memorial in South Dakota. He’s expected to stand against the backdrop of the statue’s 60-foot-tall faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt as he seeks to cement his own legacy in American history.

The president and his allies have pushed the idea of making Trump the fifth U.S. president in the lineup carved into the granite facade of Mount Rushmore, no matter that the National Park Service has said there’s no viable space to add another president to what it considers to be a completed work of art.

But that hasn’t stopped Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, a Trump loyalist who oversees U.S. national parks, from advocating it.

“Well they certainly have room for it,” Burgum said last year in a FOX News interview with Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. 

Again on Monday of this week, Burgum put Trump in the ranks with Washington and Roosevelt — though his historical detailing was wrong — telling Fox News: “We had Washington at the first, we had TR at the 125th, and we’ve got President Trump at the 250. All three of them, remarkable change makers moving our country forward.”

MS NOW reached out to the NPS this week seeking clarification on whether it would be possible to add another face to Mount Rushmore, but it has not received a response.

Two months ago, the president posted a picture on his social media platform Truth Social of his face atop Mount Rushmore, right next to Lincoln’s. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Fla., has sponsored legislation to make it a reality, albeit a long-shot bid. And former Trump adviser Roger Stone has pushed a “One More for Rushmore” petition online.

Trump has repeatedly compared himself to Lincoln, insisting he’s been treated worse. After the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner shooting in April, which is being prosecuted as another presidential assassination attempt, Trump said he has “studied assassinations,” and they go after people that “make the biggest impact.” 

In October, he said he’s been told he is the “third best president” behind Washington and Lincoln. He said that made him “extremely angry” and that while it’s going to be “very tough to beat Washington and Lincoln, we’re going to give it a try.” 

As for Roosevelt, Trump paid his respects on Wednesday at the opening of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library in North Dakota near the national park named for the 26th president.

“He was really a great he-man,” Trump said.

Trump said in September 2020 when he signed the Great American Outdoors Act during his first term that lawmakers told him he was the “number one environmental president since Teddy Roosevelt.”

Joining Roosevelt on Mount Rushmore poses its own uphill battle, perhaps far greater than the height of the monument itself. Luna’s bill has next to no chance of passing the Senate and becoming law because of the upper chamber’s 60-vote filibuster, a procedural rule Trump has sought in vain to abolish. Her bill has seen no movement since she introduced it in January 2025.

His return to the national park as part of his 250th U.S. anniversary swing — he made his last visit there four months before his election defeat in 2020 — is expected to be filled with pomp and pageantry, despite “severe to extreme” drought conditions heightening wildfire risks and a chance of thunderstorms. A NPS internal environmental assessment from March found “the proposed action will not result in significant impacts.” The NPS also said it would have a team “assess wildfire risk in the days leading up to the July 3rd event.”

It also coincides with a cavalcade of vanity projects on several fronts. Among them: a limited-edition passport featuring his face, the $16 million Lincoln Reflecting Pool renovation, three-story-tall banners with his image hanging from certain federal buildings, the White House East Wing demolition, his planned triumphal arc, the short-lived Kennedy Center rename and a proposed $250 bill with his portrait. 

In 2018, then-South Dakota Rep. Kristi Noem told her state’s Sioux Falls Argus Leader that Trump told her it was his “dream” to have his face on Mount Rushmore. She said she laughed and then realized Trump was “totally serious.”  

In 2020, as governor of South Dakota, Noem gifted Trump a four-foot replica of Mount Rushmore that included his face, according to a report by The New York Times. The Times also reported that a White House aide had reached out to the governor’s office asking what the process was to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore. Trump denied that report in a post on X.

But his denial was revealing: “Based on all of the many things accomplished during the first 3 1/2 years, perhaps more than any other Presidency, sounds like a good idea to me!” 

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